code smell

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English

Etymology

Analogous to a bad smell indicating e.g. rotten food. Apparently coined by American software engineer Kent Beck, in the late 1990s. Popularized via the book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, co-authored by Beck.

Noun

code smell (plural code smells)

  1. (programming) Anything in a program's source code that suggests the presence of a design problem.
    • 2021, Christian Clausen, Five Lines of Code: How and when to Refactor, Manning, →ISBN, page 4:
      A well-known code smell is as follows: a function should do one thing.

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